There is a wide consensus among international institutions and national governments in favor of compact (i.e. densely populated) cities as a way to improve the ecological performance of the transport system. Indeed, when both the intercity and intra-urban distributions of activities are given, a...

We present a two-country four-region model of new economic geography that partly endogenizes the level of trade costs. Contrary to the existing literature, we assume that international unit shipping costs depend on the volume of trade, due to the presence of density (dis)economies. We show that...

The objective of this paper is to apply different welfare approaches to the canonical model developed by Krugman, with the aim of comparing the only two possible market outcomes, i.e. agglomeration and dispersion. More precisely, we use the potential Pareto improvement criteria, as well as the...

Although transport costs are a key-ingredient of New Economic Geography, the transport sector is usually abstracted away from the analysis. Put differently, freight rates are taken as parametric and are not set by the market. This paper studies the relationships between transport costs, industry...

We study the impacts of changes in international trade and domestic transport costs on the internal geography of countries in the presence of geographical asymmetries.

Although transport costs are a key-ingredient of New Economic Geography, the transport sector is usually abstracted away from the analysis. Put differently, freight rates are taken as parametric and are not set by the market. This paper studies the relationships between transport costs, industry...

Our purpose is to investigate how the interplay between trade, commuting and communication costs shapes the economy at both the interregional and intra-urban levels. Specifically, we study how economic integration affects the internal structure of cities and show how decentralizing the...

New economic geography (NEG) has proven to be very useful in dealing with a large number of issues. Yet, in this paper we do not discuss the canonical NEG models and their vast number of extensions. Rather, we provide an overview of recent developments in the NEG literature that build on the...

There is a large consensus among international institutions and national governments to favor urban-containment policies - the compact city - as a way to improve the ecological performance of the urban system. This approach overlooks a fundamental fact: what matters for the ecological outcome of...